8 ms·

one million time this. as the resident tech lead I spend more time trying to get people focus on things that matters than actually designing and documenting ca

one million time this. as the resident tech lead I spend more time trying to get people focus on things that matters than actually designing and documenting can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs.

cabalamat 10y ago
> we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. Wouldn't an even simpler solution be to just use the scrolling built into browsers?
- victormustar 10y ago
  I'll do r&d for 1 or 2 days and give you the right answer :)
- unoti 10y ago
  If you need smooth scroll you can't rely on browser support and need to use a library or cook something up yourself. It's surprising how few browsers work with smooth scroll. Today it's basically only Firefox; not even Chrome.
  - woah 10y ago
    Not to be a fanboy but I use a Mac and one of the things that they clearly did a huge amount of research and fine tuning on is the scrolling. I can always tell when there's non native scrolling on a site and it always sucks. Maybe I'm out of touch, but IMO the smoothness of the scrolling is an OS or hardware level feature. If somebody's OS or hardware does not scroll smoothly, then clearly it's something that they're used to from every other site they visit. Putting a "smooth scrolling" library in makes about as much sense as rendering all of your site's text on canvas because some computers have font aliasing issues. It reeks of a micromanaging CEO getting fixated on some arbitrary requirement that makes stuff look better only on his computer.
    - unoti 10y ago
      I'm not talking about manually implementing a virtual scrollable canvas. I'm talking about "make item 19 in that list box visible in the middle of It's display area." I agree that scrolling virtual spaces should be native and hardware accelerated whenever possible, but I think we are talking about different use cases.
      - collinmanderson 10y ago
        document.querySelector('.item-19').scrollIntoView()
  - T-hawk 10y ago
    What web page or application would need smooth scrolling? What can't work with whatever scrolling is normal for the browser/OS/hardware? Looking cool at the request of some manager does not constitute a need.
    - unoti 10y ago
      Imagine there's a scrollable list of items and you want to scroll one particular item into view when some event happens. Without smooth scroll the item just pops into view and the user may not see it happening. It's a usability issue-- when the user interface jerks instantly, the user can lose context about what's happening. When it's smoothly animated it's easier for the user to keep track of what's happening in the user interface, and to see how one interaction triggers the next. Done right, animation isn't just snazzy, it produces a more usable, more approachable user interface. It helps the user keep a good mental model of what's going on. It's easier for them to mentally track "ah, when I select this item, it also selects that other item in the other list". It's the same reason why when you click an app on your phone it animates up from the app icon when the window opens. The animation wordlessly tells the user "I'm opening this app, and the window that's appearing is born of the icon you just clicked." Necessary? Not exactly. More natural? Absolutely. Nothing just snaps into existence in the real world, except for maybe things like lightning. When things appear out of nowhere it can be jarring. Animation is especially called for when it might not be intuitive why you're making a change to the visual state, or when you want to call attention to something. Keep in mind that a generation ago, pretty much every piece of software (even games!) came with a printed manual that the user needed to read first before expecting to be able to accomplish anything. Today users expect to be able to figure things out for themselves, and animation is part of the user experience that helps users learn their applications naturally by exploring the user interface.
      - K0SM0S 10y ago
        Exactly, and just we wait for mainstream VR/AR. I believe we'll see quite a lot of animation skeumorphism (is that a thing? I mean realistic animation/appearance relatively to a real world setting, e.g. gravity on objects, diffraction on transparency, etc). For a few years at least, time for users to learn new interaction paradigms and positioning within a virtual/hybrid environment.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigmanwalter 10y ago
    This is what I use right now for cross-browser smooth scrolling. It's native first with a jQuery fallback. <style> html, body { scroll-behavior: smooth; } </style> <script> // Uses native smooth scrolling if available, otherwise uses a jQuery fallback // Just add data-scroll attribute to any anchor you want to make smooth // Add data-scroll-header to a sticky nav / header to offset the window top if (!('scrollBehavior' in document.documentElement.style)) { // jQuery fallback // Taken from https://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/ $('[data-scroll]').click(function() { if (location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') == this.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') && location.hostname == this.hostname) { var target = $(this.hash); target = target.length ? target : $('[name=' + this.hash.slice(1) +']'); if (target.length) { $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: target.offset().top - $('[data-scroll-header]').height() }, 600); return false; } } }); } </script>
  - cabalamat 10y ago
    > If you need smooth scroll Why would I need smooth scroll? All it achieves is slows down the scrolling so it takes me longer to get to where i want to in the page.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Because while default scroll is fine for scrolling pages whole, in any scrollable div that's not top level it looks out of place like a blacksmith on an iceberg. It's a gray slab that looks like a tombstone riding a straight, dull rollercoaster and unless your site makes a point of having a '90s inspirational look there's no way to integrate them in a page so that it doesn't feel completely detached.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    If I was in your team I would be saying "why not just scrap scrollable divs?". I am always looking for excuses to get rid of stuff.
fredsir 10y ago
> can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the time or frequently, I can only imagine how bad the codebase will be to maintain in years, and how depressing a job it must be to work on it. That line of thought bleeds that no-one cares about the project, and only cares that the "people paying for it" hopefully don't notice the state of affairs underneath, and that they are not in a position to switch away from the product when ultimately it burns, which it will, if that is how bugs are treated. It bleeds that money is the only incentive, not heart, not passion, and that's just sad. It's why so much software is so bad and ends up costing much more in the long run than fixing the damn bugs properly right now, either because you end up having to maintain it until death, because it's so hard to maintain, or because you can't keep increasing customers after years because the product is now in such a bad state that time is spend fixing/hiding bugs instead of adding new features or improving existing ones. > ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. That is true for most people and most projects, unfortunately. Bugs should not be covered and hidden away, they should be fixed.
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  I had the same reaction as you to this post, so thank you for nicely summarizing my thoughts. I'll just add: To me, the main distinction is this: you must at the very least figure out the reason for the unwanted behavior. If you don't, then you really have no idea whether your quick little fix covered up something important or not. It's one thing to investigate, find out the cause, and then say "meh, that's way too expensive/time-consuming to fix, so we'll switch libraries/3rd party code or just remove the requirement for the special scrolling". It's quite another to just say "meh, display: none, look at how productive I am !". I've had other developers do this in front of me, and it freaks me out to no end. One sat there and told me that if he changes a month calculation to subtract a month, then the total comes out correctly. I asked him why that was and he said "Why does it matter, I'm getting the right result ?" We all need to remember that we're not being paid to type, we're being paid to think.
noxToken 10y ago
> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs In my very un-expert opinion, there has to be a balance between technical excellence and working program. I'm assuming that your case is really a non-issue. A dev wanted to find the root cause of the issue, fix the issue, and then never have to worry about it again. That's an admirable quality to me, but from your quick fix, it proved to be too much overhead for so little gain. On the other hand, you can reach a point such that you peel back a Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage, you find a generic brand adhesive bandage atop a goopy dollop of ointment atop rotting wounds. I think technical excellence is knowing when a quick-fix for your situation is good enough and knowing when you really need to roll back the sleeves to dive in.
KirinDave 10y ago
> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Depends who you are, now doesn't it? People writing core OS components, network infrastructure, cloud servides, etc have a much higher bar to hold to. But I'm in agreement with antirez that good design and solid technical underpinnings often make projects go much faster. Even if you don't know it by heart, being able to research the tools you need can give better results than not knowing at all.
- amelius 10y ago
  It also depends on what you want to do, of course. Job satisfaction matters too.
Teckla 10y ago
ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Some level of technical excellence is required, though, otherwise complex technical debt piles up, and we are then no longer able to deliver working programs.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Technical debt on something that outer on the stack is irrelevant, there's nothing we need to build on top of this behavior
  - SpaceManiac 10y ago
    Nothing you need to build, but your customers will be building their workflow around your outer layer.

cabalamat 10y ago

> we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. Wouldn't an even simpler solution be to just use the scrolling built into browsers?

victormustar 10y ago
I'll do r&d for 1 or 2 days and give you the right answer :)
unoti 10y ago
If you need smooth scroll you can't rely on browser support and need to use a library or cook something up yourself. It's surprising how few browsers work with smooth scroll. Today it's basically only Firefox; not even Chrome.
- woah 10y ago
  Not to be a fanboy but I use a Mac and one of the things that they clearly did a huge amount of research and fine tuning on is the scrolling. I can always tell when there's non native scrolling on a site and it always sucks. Maybe I'm out of touch, but IMO the smoothness of the scrolling is an OS or hardware level feature. If somebody's OS or hardware does not scroll smoothly, then clearly it's something that they're used to from every other site they visit. Putting a "smooth scrolling" library in makes about as much sense as rendering all of your site's text on canvas because some computers have font aliasing issues. It reeks of a micromanaging CEO getting fixated on some arbitrary requirement that makes stuff look better only on his computer.
  - unoti 10y ago
    I'm not talking about manually implementing a virtual scrollable canvas. I'm talking about "make item 19 in that list box visible in the middle of It's display area." I agree that scrolling virtual spaces should be native and hardware accelerated whenever possible, but I think we are talking about different use cases.
    - collinmanderson 10y ago
      document.querySelector('.item-19').scrollIntoView()
- T-hawk 10y ago
  What web page or application would need smooth scrolling? What can't work with whatever scrolling is normal for the browser/OS/hardware? Looking cool at the request of some manager does not constitute a need.
  - unoti 10y ago
    Imagine there's a scrollable list of items and you want to scroll one particular item into view when some event happens. Without smooth scroll the item just pops into view and the user may not see it happening. It's a usability issue-- when the user interface jerks instantly, the user can lose context about what's happening. When it's smoothly animated it's easier for the user to keep track of what's happening in the user interface, and to see how one interaction triggers the next. Done right, animation isn't just snazzy, it produces a more usable, more approachable user interface. It helps the user keep a good mental model of what's going on. It's easier for them to mentally track "ah, when I select this item, it also selects that other item in the other list". It's the same reason why when you click an app on your phone it animates up from the app icon when the window opens. The animation wordlessly tells the user "I'm opening this app, and the window that's appearing is born of the icon you just clicked." Necessary? Not exactly. More natural? Absolutely. Nothing just snaps into existence in the real world, except for maybe things like lightning. When things appear out of nowhere it can be jarring. Animation is especially called for when it might not be intuitive why you're making a change to the visual state, or when you want to call attention to something. Keep in mind that a generation ago, pretty much every piece of software (even games!) came with a printed manual that the user needed to read first before expecting to be able to accomplish anything. Today users expect to be able to figure things out for themselves, and animation is part of the user experience that helps users learn their applications naturally by exploring the user interface.
    - K0SM0S 10y ago
      Exactly, and just we wait for mainstream VR/AR. I believe we'll see quite a lot of animation skeumorphism (is that a thing? I mean realistic animation/appearance relatively to a real world setting, e.g. gravity on objects, diffraction on transparency, etc). For a few years at least, time for users to learn new interaction paradigms and positioning within a virtual/hybrid environment.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bigmanwalter 10y ago
  This is what I use right now for cross-browser smooth scrolling. It's native first with a jQuery fallback. <style> html, body { scroll-behavior: smooth; } </style> <script> // Uses native smooth scrolling if available, otherwise uses a jQuery fallback // Just add data-scroll attribute to any anchor you want to make smooth // Add data-scroll-header to a sticky nav / header to offset the window top if (!('scrollBehavior' in document.documentElement.style)) { // jQuery fallback // Taken from https://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/ $('[data-scroll]').click(function() { if (location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') == this.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') && location.hostname == this.hostname) { var target = $(this.hash); target = target.length ? target : $('[name=' + this.hash.slice(1) +']'); if (target.length) { $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: target.offset().top - $('[data-scroll-header]').height() }, 600); return false; } } }); } </script>
- cabalamat 10y ago
  > If you need smooth scroll Why would I need smooth scroll? All it achieves is slows down the scrolling so it takes me longer to get to where i want to in the page.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
Because while default scroll is fine for scrolling pages whole, in any scrollable div that's not top level it looks out of place like a blacksmith on an iceberg. It's a gray slab that looks like a tombstone riding a straight, dull rollercoaster and unless your site makes a point of having a '90s inspirational look there's no way to integrate them in a page so that it doesn't feel completely detached.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  If I was in your team I would be saying "why not just scrap scrollable divs?". I am always looking for excuses to get rid of stuff.

fredsir 10y ago

> can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself. If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the time or frequently, I can only imagine how bad the codebase will be to maintain in years, and how depressing a job it must be to work on it. That line of thought bleeds that no-one cares about the project, and only cares that the "people paying for it" hopefully don't notice the state of affairs underneath, and that they are not in a position to switch away from the product when ultimately it burns, which it will, if that is how bugs are treated. It bleeds that money is the only incentive, not heart, not passion, and that's just sad. It's why so much software is so bad and ends up costing much more in the long run than fixing the damn bugs properly right now, either because you end up having to maintain it until death, because it's so hard to maintain, or because you can't keep increasing customers after years because the product is now in such a bad state that time is spend fixing/hiding bugs instead of adding new features or improving existing ones. > ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. That is true for most people and most projects, unfortunately. Bugs should not be covered and hidden away, they should be fixed.

TimJYoung 10y ago
I had the same reaction as you to this post, so thank you for nicely summarizing my thoughts. I'll just add: To me, the main distinction is this: you must at the very least figure out the reason for the unwanted behavior. If you don't, then you really have no idea whether your quick little fix covered up something important or not. It's one thing to investigate, find out the cause, and then say "meh, that's way too expensive/time-consuming to fix, so we'll switch libraries/3rd party code or just remove the requirement for the special scrolling". It's quite another to just say "meh, display: none, look at how productive I am !". I've had other developers do this in front of me, and it freaks me out to no end. One sat there and told me that if he changes a month calculation to subtract a month, then the total comes out correctly. I asked him why that was and he said "Why does it matter, I'm getting the right result ?" We all need to remember that we're not being paid to type, we're being paid to think.

noxToken 10y ago

> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs In my very un-expert opinion, there has to be a balance between technical excellence and working program. I'm assuming that your case is really a non-issue. A dev wanted to find the root cause of the issue, fix the issue, and then never have to worry about it again. That's an admirable quality to me, but from your quick fix, it proved to be too much overhead for so little gain. On the other hand, you can reach a point such that you peel back a Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage, you find a generic brand adhesive bandage atop a goopy dollop of ointment atop rotting wounds. I think technical excellence is knowing when a quick-fix for your situation is good enough and knowing when you really need to roll back the sleeves to dive in.

KirinDave 10y ago

> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Depends who you are, now doesn't it? People writing core OS components, network infrastructure, cloud servides, etc have a much higher bar to hold to. But I'm in agreement with antirez that good design and solid technical underpinnings often make projects go much faster. Even if you don't know it by heart, being able to research the tools you need can give better results than not knowing at all.

amelius 10y ago
It also depends on what you want to do, of course. Job satisfaction matters too.

Teckla 10y ago

ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs. Some level of technical excellence is required, though, otherwise complex technical debt piles up, and we are then no longer able to deliver working programs.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
Technical debt on something that outer on the stack is irrelevant, there's nothing we need to build on top of this behavior
- SpaceManiac 10y ago
  Nothing you need to build, but your customers will be building their workflow around your outer layer.